The Best Four Words In The NaNo Dictionary

Phew! That was a close one. After talking far too much smack on the New York City boards the last couple day (capped off by me mistakenly claiming that Chicago was the basis for Metropolis), Team Chicago didn't let me down with its word count. I think I'll leave it up to the couple of team members who are over on the New York City board regularly to hold up the fight since I'm just screwing it up.



The Word War totals for the second count, turned out to be the following:



1. Chicago: 978093

2. Toronto: 925719

3. New York: 910024



What's a bit scary and what I didn't post in my message on the boards is that we barely won week two and Toronto's pace may catch them up with us soon. For week two, Team Chicago wrote 397,807 words. Team Toronto wrote 392,608. And Team Chicago already is down to 45 members still writing. Though I don't know what that looks like on the other teams. I'd imagine they're down around 80% of people still involved in NaNoWriMo as well.



I did send Toronto's captain a congratulatory letter on moving up to 2nd.



I'm not going to go so far as to say that if we can't win that I want Toronto to win because that comes with its own bit of embarassment if they beat us two years in a row. That being said, I don't want New York City to win if we don't either since those guys seem to have a huge ego about being the "only city that matters."



And I love New York City (else I wouldn't spend over a week there each year) but I'm beginning to get why my roommate hates everything New York City as he's Illinois born-and-bred.



I should have actually taken this whole competition as an omen. I started Eli Manning of the New York Giants over Donovan McNabb today in fantasy football. Manning had o.k. numbers (13 fantasy points) but McNabb just went off for four touchdowns (37 fantasy points). So I am going to lose (barring Matt Hasselbeck suddenly getting injured on the other team).



At least Team Chicago brought a smile to my face tonight or it would have just been an awful day (I actually lost in all three fantasy leagues, one to the last place team in a league where I was 8-1 going into the week).



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I really have to turn in early tonight as I went into work this morning and discovered that I may actually have to do my computer liaison job to a large extent tomorrow.



There are some things I discovered in Word 2007 that I'm going to have to show everyone in my department how to do. For some silly reason our I.S. department decided not to include me in the testing rollout (though I did get to see some of the new features as they did include not-Kate) even though my department does things that no other department does such as desktop fax rosters to the various states - which I found today I couldn't do.



I even have to show everyone how to print on our company letterhead since this is totally different.



What I really want to do right now is write since the last scene flowed like melted butter. I forgot what it feels like to hit a word vein since I hit them so rarely these days.



I actually enjoyed writing the scene where Tabitha comes barging in to Andy's apartment to get Little Green Envelope. I wrote some funny lines even. Like these:



“I think what you should do is give me back the keys,” Andy said.

“Or what? You’re going to call the police?”

“I could do that,” Andy said, “after all I’m not the one who’s breaking and entering, am I?”

Tabitha seemed to go into pause mode at this one. The rapid fire responses she had been giving stopped in their tracks like she had taken a bullet in the head and was just waiting to drop to the ground.

“No but…” Tabitha’s pause mode ended.

“Just give me the keys,” he said, “and we’ll pretend like this didn’t happen.”

“It’s not breaking and entering,” Tabitha said quickly, “because Kate gave me the keys.”

“Kate has, or I should say had, a right to those keys. You, little red headed devil, do not.”

So it turns out that I was right after all. Maybe Tabitha did have horns that only other humans could see.

“Her name’s on the lease too,” Tabitha said, now back to almost full speed from her slow motion, “so she still has a right to these keys, and um…”

“Um, what…”

“Give me back the DVD and I’ll sleep with you,” Tabitha said so quickly that I could barely make out the words.



I also actually wrote an action scene (not that kind of action scene, this promise never comes to fruition) where the two of them rush to get the DVD. I shouldn't really call it a scene since it's a couple of paragraphs, but whatever.



Point being, what's wonderful about this is that my characters are starting to take over the story so hopefully the writing will get easier. I even had Little Green Envelope speaking for me when he said, "well that was unexpected."



Those are the best four words in the NaNoWriMo dictionary and when they count as four words all the better.